Wholesaleinternet, who I have a dedicated server with, seemed to fall off the internet just before 5PM NZST. I can't find any information about this online; the phone number in their whois records doesn't seem to be answered. I, and other users of my dirt cheap dedicated server, hope they come back. Please?

Update: They're back, as of ~22:33 NZST. My box booted up at ~22:16 NZST. Presumably some sort of power outage, then :-)

Update: Halfway down this WebHostingTalk forum page, there are some details on What Went Wrong. Sounds unfun.

After much waiting, and calls to Slingshot's 0800 number, I've got my hands on a Grandstream BudgeTone (the model with the built in ethernet switch), all set up to talk to iTalk!

Of course, they didn't actually send me a password or anything with it, and the password I got when I rang them up only lets me use their online billing thingy. So getting Asterisk to talk to iTalk will have to wait. At least they're cheaper to terminate calls in NZ with than Freshtel are, and they support 0800 numbers too :-)

I can't help noticing that the iTalk service costs less than what I believe VUW charges itself for a single extension off their PBX... with no DDI.

update: and if you want to stick Asterisk between the BudgeTone and iTalk, these instructions which I posted to the iTalk forum may be useful. This also means that you can call +64 9 974 2112 to use IVR Adventure :-)

One of my lifelong^Whalfyearlong dreams was to produce an IVR interface to the mother of all text-adventure games, Colossal Cave. And, not having much to do over this long weekend (apart from work, and thesis work...) I thought I'd have a go at implementing it.

IVR Adventure is based on Jim Gillogy's port of the original FORTRAN version of Adventure, with an I/O layer hacked to talk to an Asterisk AGI script written in perl which provides the IVR interface. There are some parts of the game which probably don't work -- having never been asked by the game if I was a wizard, I don't know where that's supposed to happen.

If you want to play, it's available on the VUW PABX at extension 6735, and via the PSTN at +64 4 463 6735, and +1 360 226 7575. The Wellington number is probably the most reliable way to use it, though.

I finished writing enough second-tier code for moonet to work. Or it did last week, when I last played with it.

If the images are taking longer to load, then it's playing up again. I wish it wouldn't.

On the plus side, I ended up developing the code in Eclipse, which made good use of my twin 17" LCD monitors. And I used an IDE's debugger for the first time since Turbo C++ 3.0 for DOS! They seem to be quite useful on these modern systems where your applications don't take up the entire screen, and the same applications run inside a VM that knows about threads and stacks and objects and references and fields. Every time I use Eclipse I'm impressed by it -- it's a truly useful piece of software, and it's free!

I intended to blog about the accident I ended up on Tuesday, but didn't get around to it. As a backseat passenger, I didn't see much -- just heard "Oh, shit", looked up and saw the gap between us and the truck in front was closing faster than our brakes could slow us down. I did, however, receive the only visible injury -- I hit my eye on the back of the seat in front of me. Thankfully my glasses flew off before this, so it was fairly minor, and has now almost healed.

I was, nonetheless, given a copy of the ACC's "So, you've had a mild head injury" pamphlet, and decided to take it east for the next day or so. Which would have been nicer if I didn't have any work to do :-)

On Friday I acquired an enormous AlphaServer 2100 4/275 from someone on IRC. I couldn't make it boot.

Today I plugged in an external SCSI1 CDROM drive which it seemed to be happy with, and which could read my debian install CD. All was well.

But I still had a problem. The ethernet cards in the system wouldn't work. There was an old 21040 10Mbps card, and a newer eepro100. Neither seemed to work properly -- which is why I didn't do a netinstall in the first place. So I looked inside. There were lots of spare slots. They looked odd, but I had some vague recollection that 64 bit PCI might look like that. And my RTL8139 PCI card fitted in one.

Alas, when I turned the beast on after fitting the RealTek NIC, I smelt that awful smell of overheating components. Pulling the card out was no good; the POST got to "TEST I/O_00 0006" and stopped. I pulled out other cards, to no avail. I noticed that some were in real PCI slots, and the VGA card looked suspiciously EISA-like.

This was a very disappointing way to learn what is nonetheless an important lesson. PCI cards fit in EISA slots.

:-(

Interface had a successful AGM last night; we achieved a quorum without bribing people with promises of free Pizza or other exciting stuff, elected a new committee, in which I'm not the president (yay!), and had some good discussion on things the club should be doing. Here's hoping the rest of the year is as successful!

Well, the old moo net design looked like it required too much work up front, so it's not going to happen like that. Now, URL validation is merely a matter of ensuring that there's a site.site.moo.net.nz record in the DNS; this also has to be set up as a ServerAlias for the site in question. The caches are then just simple apache configurations, plus squid; no messy URL validation required.

Also, server selection will be different. Instead of looking at routers, I'm going for RTT estimation. This should give a better result, and means we can have multiple overseas machines which don't require a view of the routing table. It does require some code to work out the RTTs, but this has now mostly been written; all that's needed is more caching, and some fixups, and that side should work. And the design I'm using means that adding network-specific (e.g. WIX) servers later shouldn't require major changes.

Stuff I still need to write, therefore:

• finish, test traceroute multiplexer
• write, test cache code to run on client webservers
• write, test simple PHP, perl clients
• build a simple 302.moo.net.nz server that 302s to the nearest server, for lazy people

Also, it would be nice to be able to borrow a box near APE. And I should get some content to distribute. And then the Venture Capital... :P

Scenario: $GERMAN_FLATMATE wants to call home. They have bought a calling-card with a reasonably sized, non-refundable balance. We don't have a normal phone line^[1], and calling Wellington for AUD0.05/minute is more expensive than calling Germany on their calling card.

Solution: Flatmate finds someone to sell his calling card to. We find a cheap VoIP provider in Germany (and they seem to be the cheapest for calling +49: EUR0.01/minute). Activate an account with them (which requires finding someone in Germany to answer their phone and type some DTMF digits). And then try to set up Asterisk to talk to them.

This becomes difficult, because $GERMAN_FLATMATE doesn't know anything about VoIP, and I don't know any German, and GMX's website does not have an english version. Downloading their softphone, running the installer under Wine and then running strings and grep over what it spewed into C:\WINDOWS\TEMP told us that their SIP server was sip.gmx.net. Googling for this seemed to be reasonably successful -- but all the results were in German, and didn't make a lot of sense to the aforementioned flatmate. After some fiddling, we got it working happily with Asterisk. For future reference, the username you use is the German phone number you activated the account with, in full international format (49...) and the password is the GMX NetPhone password you had to enter when you created the NetPhone account.

[1] We do have incoming telephone numbers. They are a US toll-free number (+1-800-923-8704), a number in the town of Enumclaw in Washington State(+1-360-226-7575), and a number in Berlin (+49 30 868708252). They were all free. However trying to activate NetPhone with the Berlin number didn't seem to work; the automated GMX system called us, but didn't seem to hear the DTMF digits properly.

Yesterday (Wednesday) was Cultural Clubs Day. Lots of tables in the Quad, with yours truly behind the Interface one, sandwiched in between the Meat Loaf Appreciation Club and the Sci-fi club. But we signed up some members, and persuaded people to come along to that evening's meeting.

The meeting itself went well; despite a lack of quorum for the exec-meeting part we ended up productively discussing plans for the year (or at least the next few months) -- hopefully we'll actually get stuff done this year.